Jean Katambayi Mukendi

Jean Katambayi Mukendi – Dialyse, 2025

Work on view during Border Buda Expo:

Afrolampes, 2021-2023

• Budasesteenweg 96, Brussel

Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s work Dialyse will be inaugurated on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Buda Bridge in 2025, situated adjacent to this historic landmark. The work bears reference to the process of dialysis, a treatment for kidney failure in which waste products are excreted from the blood. This therapeutic procedure holds particular significance in urban settings like Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s hometown of Lubumbashi, where the population is increasingly exposed to metallurgical or chemical toxicity on a daily basis. Industrial pollution leads to physical pollution, exposing the intricately linked triangular relationship between energy, economy and ecology at macro and micro levels.

Near the Buda Bridge, the Willebroek canal was once flanked by numerous heavily polluting industries, including the Cokeries de Marly and Eternit. This area was enveloped in dark, noxious plumes of smoke until just a few decades ago. These industrial activities led to significant soil pollution, with various contaminants seeping into the groundwater and waterways. Efforts have since been made to remediate the soil on large plots of land, and since 2007, the Aquiris wastewater treatment plant has been tasked with treating Brussels’ wastewater to help restore the Senne River to a healthy state. The canal and the Senne, along with the adjacent roads dominated by cargo traffic, serve as the arteries of the capital region. In Dialyse, Jean Katambayi Mukendi makes substantive connections between Buda’s industrial past and the violent mining industry in Lubumbashi, where the mining of raw materials, such as cobalt, has pernicious social and ecological consequences.

This work will be created with the support of Julien De Bock.

From April 26 to May 26, visitors to Border Buda will be able to view Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s series of drawings Afrolampes (2022), which will be reproduced as banners near the location where the future artwork Dialyse will be inaugurated. The drawings establish an intriguing connection to the other artworks featured in Border Buda, many of which explore the (im)materiality of light as an indicator of speed, distance and time. The placement of Afrolampes in front of Buda Bxl, which occupies the historical site of the Eternit factory, serves as a prelude to the themes explored in Dialyse.

About

Jean Katambayi Mukendi was born in 1974 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He lives and works in Lubumbashi, DRC. Trained as an electrician, his entire artistic practice is imbued with his fascination for mathematics, engineering, geometry, and technology. Profoundly marked by his upbringing in the workers’ camp of his mining hometown and by its mechanisation, Katambayi creates fragile and complex installations and drawings inspired by sophisticated electrical circuits and technological studies. His works are part of a search for solutions to social problems in current Congolese society, as well as to the country’s depletion of its enormous energetic resources. Often made of recycled and impermanent material, such as cardboard and recycled electronic material, the artist’s poetic pieces attempt to redress the imbalance of the world’s hemispheres. (www.waldburgerwouters.com)